The Argument for States’ Rights

For too long, the concept of “states’ rights” has had a negative connotation. Racial strife in the post-Civil War era made taboo the notion of returning power to the states. But allocating power to the several states was never about race; it was about a constitutional framework that hoped to limit the mistakes of government and provide the greatest amount of freedom and decision-making to the people in the several states. Rediscovering the principles of dividing power within the republic is the best guarantor that the errors of the past don’t return on a much larger scale.

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are a divided nation—precisely because we have chosen to consolidate government by unleashing it from its constitutional moorings. A one-size-fits-all policy dictated by unelected bureaucrats and judges in Washington D.C. has not brought the country together—to the contrary, it has torn us apart. For example, three of the most divisive issues of our time will not be decided by the people, but most likely by the Supreme Court of the United States.